Step 4: Manage Your Teaching Team

Clearly establish Teaching Team roles and expectations.

Students and preceptors work much better when roles and expectations are clearly defined. When tangible results are met, preceptors feel like they've made a difference, and you will feel great about uncovering a new, dynamic resource for teaching and learning.

Most importantly, having clear roles and expectations gives instructors measurable results for assessing students and instructional performance.

Establish regular meetings with your team.

This is the most important aspect of teaching team management. It is particularly important early in the semester when roles and expectations are being established.

Some faculty have found regular meeting times to be so crucial to the management of their teaching team that they only accept preceptors who can make a pre-established meeting times. This ensures all preceptors can make the teaching team meeting, which, in turn makes communication better and the entire process much more cohesive and focused.

Find communication strategies that work for your team.

Listservs and specially designated discussions on D2L can go a long way towards keeping everyone informed and up to date.

Build in accountability.

Try to treat the teaching team as a team so that individual preceptors have support as well as backup.
Make sure your preceptors are visible within the course. Take time to introduce your preceptors and explain what they are there for. This should be done both in person in the classroom as well as in the syllabus, on D2L, on the course website, and in any other resources you will use for class. This will help the rest of your class take the preceptors seriously and help make the preceptors more effective and accessible.

Establish consistent opportunities for feedback.

Use multiple methods that are consistent and meet students' varied needs for confidentiality and communication.